“Love Yourself Program” off to a good start

I am very excited about the outcome of the first class of the “Love Yourself Program”, which was attended by over 30 lovely people.

Thank you so much for the energy and the power that you brought to the class.

Some of you have shared your great beginning experiences after the class and I would like to thank you for that. I encourage you to continue to share all your experiences, such as things that helped or didn’t help, so that I can explain them better or show you more ways of doing so.

You can share them on my website under the comments section or send me a private e-mail.

Some of you have asked me if I have CDs for relaxation. If you sign up to join the community on the homepage, you will receive a free relaxation mp3 — listen to it, and if you want a deeper experience, you can look take a look at the Stress Relief Tools for specific CDs to purchase.

I am willing to share my own personal journey with you as we learn together so that you can see that it is not yours or mine, but it is more about the human journey and struggle. My hope is that you can identify with the parts that are similar to yours and maybe that would make your journey much faster and easier.

I would like to give you a few main points of the class so you can ponder over them:

In the class, we looked at mindfulness.

Here is a definition for you: Mindfulness is the non-judging attention to observe present time life experiences as they really are. It is associated with patience and acceptance, without expectation of outcome, without clinging to the pleasant experience or rejecting the unpleasant one.

We know that mindfulness is not a goal to be achieved but is an ongoing awareness practice. It is a habit, a way of being that gets better with practice. The quality of our life is determined by the quality of our attention and awareness.

“An unexamined life is not worth living.” – Henry David Thoreau

We have also seen how our childhood conditioning, what we learned from the people who raised us influences how we experience ourselves. We have to change this relationship with ourselves first if we were to change our life and outer relationships, which is a reflection of this.

Emotions – the energy that moves through our body – get very complicated by the stories we tell ourselves about them. Instead of letting this energy flow through our body smoothly and easily like when we were a child, now we try to avoid them, hold on to them, or run away from them.

How do we put all this together?

This week – you are bringing mindfulness, focused non-judgmental awareness, to any movement of energy, emotion in your body.

Notice your self-talk, just be curious and listen to the automatic tape going on in your head, whenever you notice a strong emotion in your body. You are also paying attention to who this reminds you of – amongst the people who raised you.

This is an ongoing repetition of the two guided imagery exercises we did in the class – noticing the various emotions in your body and the observation of the impact of the people who raised you.

Have fun doing this. Just be curious to watch and what you would discover. We do not have to change anything. Just notice.

All that you have to do is to bring in the light of your attention. The darkness would naturally vanish.